Category Archives: Customer Experience

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We are indeed. It’s a modern reality where customers call the shots, armed with the knowledge that they have options. This includes their expectation of a certain level of customer experience, one that is seamless, omnichannel, and with bot offerings. In fact, according to Forrester, today’s “consumers have more tech at their disposal than ever before and it has fundamentally changed how they experience brands.” With more than 50% of companies already using chatbots, and 80% of businesses wanting chatbots by 2020 ( says Oracle), bots have been, and will be, rapidly transforming the customer service and customer experience landscape, especially in retail. In an article by Retail Dive, “Juniper estimates that by 2023 over 70% of chatbots accessed will be retail based.” Think about how many digital assistants, chatbots, and IVR’s that actually refers to, and in what capacity.

At a healthy 75 years’ old, the Scandinavian born-and-bred brand has well surpassed middle-age and earned its place among retail royalty, continuing to thrive and expand its utilitarian-while-whimsical offerings into the online world. Its products are nestled in households across the globe. Phrases from its brilliantly funny ads have crawled into common parlance. IKEA isn’t simply a store: It’s a cultural force.

IKEA’s long-running epic success is the result of its allegiance to a specific set of principles that guide its every move: To nurture loyalty, a company must dare to be a fixture at every stage of customers’ lives. It must consider their every want and desire. It must meet their needs with products, online and in-store experiences, and customer service offerings.

The proof is in the pudding: Loyal consumers continue to flock to the imposing blue mecca in their town centers (and soon, urban centers) because of IKEA’s ability to hold a customer’s familiar hand throughout their lifetime. With seven decades under its belt, the company has much to teach us about how offering powerful customer experiences can make a brand a force to be reckoned with.

Welcome to January, a time that kick-starts a new year and inspires us to improve, grow, and set goals. This goes for contact center managers and agents as well; for them, January is certainly “reach for the stars and crush your goals” month (as is every month!).

We at Fonolo are certainly here to help them out on their overall journeys in 2019, this time by offering a rundown of the lessons we learned from the industry last year.

Outsourcing work is appealing for many reasons: It can save your business money, resources, and under the right circumstances, a serious headache. Almost any element of a company can be outsourced, anything from data entry to graphic design. However, the decision becomes more complicated when outsourcing means that another company will be in interacting with your customers. This is certainly the case with call centers.

Contracting out your call center can cut overheads significantly, but poor service could lead to a mass departure of customers. As a result, it’s important to carefully weigh the pros and cons of outsourcing.

The reality is that outsourcing is not a one-size-fits-all solution. In this blog, you’ll find three of the most notable pros and cons of outsourcing a call center. These pros and cons will help you decide if outsourcing is the right choice for your business.

135 blog posts. Over 5000 Twitter followers. New initiatives. A new platform. New patents. New partnerships. New customers. It has been a busy, extraordinary year for Fonolo’s growth across channels and industries, made possible by the ongoing hard work of our dedicated employees, partners, and clients. What drives us is our deep belief in strengthening customer service and customer experience for call centers and contact centers across North America, and the knowledge that our solutions are making customers happier than ever.

December has arrived, which means different things for different people. While many of us are gearing up to slow down and spend quality time with family and friends, retail companies are bracing themselves for the clamor and chaos of the holiday season. From Black Friday to Cyber Monday to Boxing Day, this season signals a momentous time when consumers across the globe are ready and willing to spend, spend, spend.

Since most companies can anticipate a significant peak in sales during the final few months of the year, they can also anticipate a spike in customers, and in turn, a big increase in service requests. Here are a few things every retail company can do to maintain a high level of customer service and ensure that the momentum gained is maintained this festive season both in-store and online.

2018 has been a pivotal year for customer experience (CX). Industry wide, there is now a deeper understanding of CX as a multi-faceted, complex, incredibly important piece in the success (or failure) of any brand.

With this in mind, we’ve rounded up the most important and fascinating CX predictions for 2019, and provided our own thoughts on what they mean and how they will impact businesses in future. To stay at the top of your game in the year ahead, it’s essential to understand larger CX trends and how they are shaping our world and our industry. Read on as we detail five fascinating CX predictions to inform your 2019 CX strategy.

Onholdwith.com, the Fonolo-powered site that mines Twitter for real-time complaints about being put on hold (and folks, there are many, many complaints), has today made its annual list of hold-time offenders available for all the world to see. And you may be surprised by who made the list.

OnHoldWith.com, launched by Fonolo a few years back, this year collected over a whopping 165,000 posts mentioning the phrase “on hold with” from Twitter. And as those of us in customer service know to a sobering degree, Twitter has quickly become a go-to platform customers use to shout about frustrating customer service experiences. The tweets informing the report this year confirm that: a) customers are increasingly turning to social media to publicly out companies for poor customer service handling; and b) a benchmark of this poor service is placing a customer on hold.

While the companies on this year’s top 10 list are doing exquisite things in their industries (and trust us, we are big fans of all of them), the results of this year’s report signal that brands could be doing things even better, starting with sprucing up their customer service offerings.

No, it’s the top contact center trends to watch for in 2019. And we’ve got you covered.

So many storylines, so little time. And as in any classic comic book, the storylines are familiar and sometimes predictable, but we foresee them taking captivating turns in the new year.

As the sun sets on 2018, contact center superheroes should watch for the plots, characters, and villains within them. As always, we keep watch of trends and issues pertinent to contact centers, continuously shifting due to technological advancements; mergers and acquisitions in the SaaS space; the realigning of customer service and experience priorities on the part of brands; and more.

Good customer service is crucial to the success of any business. It also happens to be one of the hardest things to ‘get right’, even for the most seasoned of brands. Imagine spending eight hours a day fixing problems you didn’t cause in the first place. Now imagine that your hands are tied in a million different ways and you’re unable to resolve the bulk of the customer complaints that are on the rise. This scenario is real, widespread, and is likely the reason for high attrition rates in the customer service industry.

This is why empowering a customer service team can be key to the overall success of any company. While we could go on for days about the benefits that come from giving your call center employees autonomy, here are the top three reasons you should actively work to support your customer service employees.